Mellow Gold

About

In between 1993 and '94, 23-year-old Beck Hansen went from a coffeeshop singer, cassette tape hustler, and self-described leaf-blower guy to an unlikely pop star with a Top 10 single. "Loser" was recorded on an 8-track recorder in producer Karl Stephenson's living room and featured slurred gibberish-rap, a funky acoustic guitar loop, sitar, and an instantly indelible chorus that was catnip in the age of angst. "Loser" snowballed from 500-edition indie release to college radio to modern rock radio to major-label bidding war to Geffen deal to MTV to its eventual enshrining in the bronze of a Weird Al polka medley. It was quite the introduction to postmodern folkie b-boy—where the b could stand for beat poetry, Bob Dylan, Beastie Boy, Beat Happening, or Boredom. His major-label debut, <i>Mellow Gold</i>, spread that genre-melding junk-shop art-rock across 13 tracks: offbeat poetry that drew the line between <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> and Ultramagnetic MC', fuzz-grunge bluster, a blues song about washing dishe, junkyard percussion, a kazoo solo, a Care Bears sample, Velvet Underground-y drone raga, and a hidden noise suite called "Analog Odyssey." It's an album of both protest ("Give the finger to the rock 'n' roll singer/As he's dancing upon your paycheck") and inscrutable turns of phrase ("Touch me on the inside with a finger full of gravy" or the immortal “Like a giant dildo crushing the sun”) taking a warped prism to his job, his neighbor, and—in his most iconic chorus—his own rapping abilitie. .

via Apple Music

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